Hi Geminauts,

Is there any accepted standard for declaring when the language used in a
document changes? I'd like to do this to aid screen readers in picking
the correct accent and pronunciation for text-segments.

For example, in "The Picture of Dorian Gray," Wilde writes:

> he kept saying over and over to himself:
>
>> "Devant une façade rose,
>> Sur le marbre d'un escalier."
>
> The whole of Venice was in those two lines.

Reading the French section in an English accent isn't the ideal user
experience so it would be good to be able to tell the computer how to do
better.

Since this goes beyond the Gemini standard (which only supports
declaring languages in the media type, see 5.2), is there an agreed upon
standard to indicate the language changing between paragraphs? I'd
assume just plopping a language marker before the paragraph would be
sufficient, but maybe there are better ways.

> he kept saying over and over to himself:
>
>> lang=fr
>> "Devant une façade rose,
>> Sur le marbre d'un escalier."
>
> lang=en
> The whole of Venice was in those two lines.

Thanks for your time,
Nick

On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 12:51:14 -0500, Nick wrote:
> Hi Geminauts,
>
> Is there any accepted standard for declaring when the language used in a
> document changes? I'd like to do this to aid screen readers in picking
> the correct accent and pronunciation for text-segments.

I don't believe so. There was previously some discussion around putting
some inline metadata at the start of a preformatted block to aid in
screenreaders and this is included in the spec but the particular
format of the 'alt text' is not defined.

I know you can click on a preformatted block in Lagrange and it will show
the alt text but I don't know of much other user-agent support for it.

Since gemtext doesn't have any other non-printing line-types I think that's
likely to be the only place available to attempt such a feature.

--
"The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
--Kosh